San Francisco’s Shaolin Controversy
Posted by ampontan on Thursday, May 3, 2007
AFTER STUDYING BUDDHISM in Hong Kong for 40 years, Stephen Ho immigrated to San Francisco and decided he wanted to open an American branch of the famed Shaolin Temple, the birthplace of both Zen and Kung Fu.
The temple’s abbot in China gave Ho his permission and dispatched a monk who had trained at the temple for more than 20 years to help.
But Ho—who never trained at the Shaolin Temple himself–thinks the monks from China don’t perform enough sitting meditation or hold enough “philosophical discussion”. He plans to cut them off and find some priests more to his liking.
For their part, the Shaolin monks live in a rundown former rooming house in Oakland, and are presenting some astonishing demonstrations of the effectiveness of Qigong practice, such as withstanding sledgehammer blows to the arm while steel bars beneath are broken.
An aide to the San Francisco mayor says the Shaolin monks don’t know much about Buddhism, but others retort that neither the political aide nor Ho, a retired IBM engineer, know much about Shaolin. The monk’s defenders say Shaolin kung fu is indeed a form of meditation.
Here’s the full report from the San Francisco Chronicle.
For more on the connection between mysticism, the martial arts, and Qigong, here’s a previous Ampontan post about the Japanese ninja master, Masaaki Hatsumi.
And this is apparently the website for the Shaolin Temple in China, complete with photos of a Vladimir Putin visit. They don’t seem to be averse to a little commercialism, but as an article on the site explains, they can’t even use the term Shaolin Temple in Japan because someone else holds the trademark.
